GOP Kills Obamacare Mandate with Freedom-Restoring Tax Vote

Economists are divided as to whether the Republican Party’s big tax reform bill will be the economy-boosting goliath that they’re claiming it’s going to be or whether it will simply be a nice chunk of change for most of the country to enjoy for the next few years, but either way, there’s no denying that this bill accomplished at least one important task. Assuming that the elimination of the Obamacare individual mandate stays in the bill after House reconciliation, the GOP just went a long way towards restoring individual choice and overall liberty with Thursday night’s vote.

Amazingly enough, the Senate only eliminated the mandate because it would help them SAVE $350 billion and allow them to make further tax cuts. Now how does this make any sense? How can it be that ELIMINATING a tax actually restores billions of dollars in revenue? Can it be that President Obama and the Democrats were so incompetent that they were passing mandatory taxes that would actually cost the federal government money to implement?

Well, sort of. The deal is that by eliminating the mandate, approximately 15 million Americans will choose to let their insurance policies expire. Because they never wanted to buy health insurance in the first place and were only doing it because it made more sense than to simply throw hundreds of dollars at the IRS on April 15. But now that they’re free and clear to drop their policies, they probably will. This allows the government to save billions in subsidies that it would have otherwise had to hand to the insurance companies so those companies could afford to insure these individuals at – cough, cough – affordable rates. This is how the Obamacare scam worked…if you want to call a system that deranged “working.”

So anyway, the mandate is gone and now the government can save money. It sounds nonsensical, but that’s how it goes when you try to figure out the logic of Democrats. What’s important is not that we figure out how all of the moving parts of Obamacare work but that we now have the federal government slowly but surely easing its way out of the health insurance business.

The idea of forcing Americans to buy health insurance was a ludicrous, anti-freedom one to begin with, and it was always one of the most unpopular aspects of the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately for those who actually liked the law, it may have been a necessary one. Without that mandate, the death spiral is likely to spin into acceleration, finally delivering us from this terrible health law once and for all.

We may not have gotten that repeal and replace bill we wanted, but in their tax vote, the GOP went a long way towards eliminating Obamacare.